


Someday I Might Love You, One Day You Might Die (Jim Beam, Sherry, and Cherry Pie)

by cacophonyGilded



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Anonymous Sex, Extremely Minor Original Character(s), Gratuitous Backstory Headcanon, Hand Jobs, M/M, Not AU, One Night Stands, Pre-Canon, Smoking, Teenage Delinquent Jim Gordon, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:48:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26594737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cacophonyGilded/pseuds/cacophonyGilded
Summary: With years to go before they will become Commissioner Gordon and the Penguin (or even Rookie Detective Gordon and Fish Mooney's Umbrella Boy), Jim and Oswald have a chance encounter that could, but does not, change the course of their lives.
Relationships: Oswald Cobblepot/Jim Gordon
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27





	Someday I Might Love You, One Day You Might Die (Jim Beam, Sherry, and Cherry Pie)

**Author's Note:**

> you know tfw you think you're finally out of gotham hell but then some random, innocuous post reminds you of it and you infodump for hours and then decide to watch one (1) episode, just to remember how much you liked it, and suddenly you're doing an entire rewatch and reviving your undying love for gobblepot and writing a fic you had the idea for over a year ago but never really touched? and now here you are?
> 
> ...yeah. all this to say: new gobblepot content? in 2020? it's more likely than you might think.

Jim Gordon, age 18, rolls up to the checkout counter of a seedy, late-night drugstore (a mile and a half away from his mother’s apartment in the wrong direction) with the store’s cheapest bottle of whiskey, his well-worn fake ID, and a bristling,  _ edgy _ bad mood out of hell.

He probably thinks he’s pretty tough. Behind the counter, Oswald Cobblepot—just recently 19—has been dealing with similarly tough guys all his life. He rolls his eyes at the gratuitous posturing and puffing, and affords only the fakest of his courteous customer service smiles for the performance.

Oswald hasn’t honestly checked for an ID—fake or otherwise—since he was hired for this job seven months ago. The owners don’t give a shit, obviously, and the only people who even bother with fakes are uptown rich boys like his current company, coming down to the sketchy side of Gotham because they feel like invincible tourists, entitled to have all of the city and none of its problems. As far as Oswald is concerned, these types can’t possibly kill themselves off quickly enough, so no, he normally has no problem handing out the top-shelf liquor they inevitably prefer like dime store candy, but tonight… well,  _ tonight, _ Oswald has had a bad day, he’s in one hell of a mood, and if this overgrown chauvinist douchebag thinks he’s going to meekly look the other way and bend to his unspoken threats of violence, he’s got another thing coming.

They keep a shotgun behind the counter. Oswald has never had to use it, but that’s the point; just the sight of the thing sends guys like this running. He’s sure this one will be no different, and so, he waits.

The extremely fake smile twisting Oswald’s face has the desired effect. The boy that’s approached him scowls even deeper, shoving the fake into Oswald’s line of sight like he wishes it were flesh he was getting to brutalize.

Such hatred. Oswald’s smile becomes a little more genuine, though no less twisted and ugly and intended to provoke. This kid isn’t the only one in the store itching for a fight tonight.

Picking up the ID, Oswald intends only to make the guy squirm, looking over it for a long, long time and savoring the discomfort he’ll milk from the transaction before finally handing it back with that same oily, insincere grin and selling him the booze anyway, because again: natural selection can’t claim people like this soon enough. That’s what he intends to do.

What Oswald  _ actually _ does, picking up the fake and squinting at it maliciously, is choke out a high, strangled laugh before he can think to bite it back.

So much for his unflappable demeanor. It still clearly pisses off the jerkbag, though, so Oswald doesn’t get to mourn all too much for what might have been.

“What,” the boy demands, an annoyed furrow creasing his brow as this confrontation veers off the path he’d intended for it. Oswald loses the fight to maintain composure and simply scoffs, waving the ID in front of its owner’s face derisively.

“This is the worst fake I’ve seen in my life. It’s… actually kind of  _ impressive, _ did you make this yourself?”

The boy grabs his card back and Oswald lets him, a little mollified in his amusement. His present company, however, only bristles all the more.

“You’re out of your mind. This is a perfectly valid driver’s license, issued by the state of—”

“Yeah?” Oswald challenges, his eyes flaring. “What’s your  _ birthday?” _

“July—”

The boy shuts his eyes in regret in the same moment as Oswald thrills with triumph. The date on the card is January 1st. 

“Uh _ -huh,” _ Oswald lilts, swiping the card back just to parade its failings in front of the guy who no doubt paid top dollar of Mommy and Daddy’s money to buy it.  _ Sucker. _ “Not to mention, there’s supposed to be a watermark  _ here _ and  _ here, _ ‘weight’ is misspelled, and…,” he looks up, considering. “This says you’re 6’1.”

“Hey, I’m….” At the flash of Oswald’s eyes, the sucker drags a hand over his face. “Fine, forget it. Just give it back.”

“One more thing.  _ James Beam? _ What, did ‘Jack Daniels’ seem too obvious?”

“Listen,” says the reprobate, patience suddenly snapping as he reaches over the counter and hauls Oswald up by the front of his shirt. Oswald momentarily freezes in fear, but he’s no stranger to physical violence against his person (the fresh black eye he’s sporting and the residual ache from a more pointed beating sustained earlier in the week  _ more _ than attesting to that), so he plays things smart, and he plays things safe. Rather than struggle against his captor, he simply goes still, still and  _ silent _ (there’s something about Oswald’s voice that seems to bring out the worst in people), and slowly, silently, Oswald inches one hand under the counter toward the gun.

He  _ hates _ the night shift. His boss hates him, though, which he’s pretty sure is the point.

“I’ve had a shit night, and I want to get out of here, get blackout drunk, and forget the whole thing. So you’re gonna sell me this booze, or—”

“Or  _ what?” _ Oswald hisses, his hand finding the trigger of the gun and itching to pull it. “Do you think you’re the biggest, meanest thing that’s threatened me here? That’s threatened me  _ today? _ I have my hand on a shotgun,  _ James, _ so I suggest you let go of me, leave the bottle, and walk away.”

There’s a momentary flash of something that’s not quite fear in the guy’s expression, but he does let go of Oswald. What he does  _ not _ do is step back from the counter. His eyes, still strangely close, study Oswald as he goes through the motions of dusting himself off: straightening the oversized shirt that counts as his uniform, pulling at his collar, and sniffing haughtily. 

“This some kind of power trip for you, jackass?” asks the boy at length. He’s glowering. Like, actually  _ glowering. _ “We’re half a block from the Narrows. No one here checks ID.”

Oswald sneers, thinking that maybe this  _ is _ a power trip, but one he’s more than earned the right to, considering. He’s lost count by now of how many he’s been on the wrong side of. 

“Guess you’ve just got bad luck. Now,” and suddenly, probably because he knows it’ll just piss off the little alcoholic, Oswald slips his brightest customer service smile back on and simpers, “Is there anything else I can help you with today, or will that be all?”

As expected, Mr.  _ Beam _ twitches, anger clearly pushing him to lunge for Oswald’s shirtfront again as he spits out, “You’re a real dick.”

There’s a fire inside Oswald, something unnatural and hungry and distinctly power-trippy, and it flares to life at the statement. His hand never having left the shotgun, it’s short work to pull it now into view, the would-be assailant’s face far too close to his own for his liking, setting it on the counter with a definitive thump. He really, really should not be doing this… but who’ll know? It’s not like this juvenile delinquent with the fake ID is going to call the cops on him.

He hopes.

“Oh, yes,” Oswald says, weirdly manic, “I am. You think  _ your _ day was shit? What happened—parents cut off your credit card? Girlfriend break your heart?” He affects a false sympathy, miming the wiping away of a tear.  _ “Boo-hoo. _ Your life is so hard, isn’t it? Well,  _ James, _ my day has been fairly shit too, thank you. You see, my  _ mother _ was dragged off and institutionalized in front of me. I was beaten by a cop when I tried to stop them,” he points at his eye, “and  _ then _ I had to come to this  _ establishment _ to work a twelve hour shift on top of the ten hours I put in this morning at my other place of employment. You’ll have to forgive me, then, for not having much in the way of sympathy for the plight of some uptown freeloader who wanted to take advantage of this neighborhood’s crime rate in order to get an  _ easy pass at liquor.” _

Breathing hard, tears in his eyes, and having revealed far, far more about himself than he had altogether intended, Oswald holds the gun in front of him and jerks his head at the door.

“Now please leave.”

The kid, who has been watching Oswald with cautious,  _ curious _ eyes ever since he pulled out the shotgun and perhaps even a little before that, gulps. He’s kept his hands where Oswald can see them ever since it became apparent that he’d gotten more than he bargained for here—smart boy—and took one involuntary step back, but he’s still strangely, intimately close to the counter, and when Oswald finishes his impromptu speech, he talks, unbidden.

Oswald is not altogether prepared for what he has to say.

“I’m sorry,” says this “James,” stepping forward again. His hands are still in the air, but he encroaches on Oswald’s space—Oswald, who now has to retract his previous statement; does this idiot actually  _ want _ to die?—and studies him. What is he…? “I didn’t know.”

Oswald blinks, and then, against all odds, finds himself snorting back laughter again. He feels the anger drain out of his posture and drops the aim of the shotgun off the apologizer, putting it back on the hooks affixed beneath the counter for this purpose. If he’s anything in this moment, he’s simply resigned.

Another win for excellent customer service.

“How could you have? You quite literally do not know me.”

“I know I’ve been a dick,” the dick offers, saying something true and off-putting for the first time in their brief, mostly unpleasant acquaintance. “And that I came in here angry at the world and looking for a fight.”

Nearly against his will, Oswald realizes that he’s been disarmed—physically  _ and _ emotionally—and that he suddenly feels small, sad, and goddamn exhausted. 

“You’re not the first person to do that, you won’t be the last. Look, that got out of hand, and I apologize. Most profusely. But really, is there anything else you need…?”

He wants the boy to say no, to clear out and leave Oswald to his night of feeling wretched about his situation and trying with everything he’s got left not to pass out. Naturally, things are never quite that simple. 

Especially not for him. 

Instead of doing what would be appreciated, his aggressor closes his eyes for a long time, massages the bridge of his nose like he has a migraine, and then drops a confession like a bomb to rival Oswald’s own.

“I was kicked out tonight. From the place I’ve been staying—that is, uh, my girlfriend’s house. Ex-girlfriend, I guess. Just…,” he drags a hand down his face and turns as if to hide unseemly tears, leaning the bulk of his weight on the checkout counter and looking about as defeated as Oswald feels. 

Such is the nature of mutually assured destruction, he supposes, and the consequence for deploying nukes. 

Ugh. 

“...Don’t know what I’m going to do from here, I guess.”

Maybe Oswald hadn’t been as keen as he thought when he clocked this guy as a scumbag jock from the local highschool or Gotham U. Or, well, maybe it doesn’t  _ end _ there. Voice a little softer than he wants it to be, Oswald reaches out, stopping just shy of actually touching. (He knows exactly how well  _ that _ would work out for him.) 

“Aren’t you a little young to be couch surfing? Why don’t you…,” he trails off, tilts his head. “You know.”

“Go home?”

Oswald nods; his conversational partner scoffs. “Mom’s new boyfriend hates me. Kicked me out months ago.”

“And you don’t have any friends…?”

“Not on short notice. Not tonight.” He sighs, eyes closed again, like if he can’t see the world, it won’t be there, encroaching on him with pain and suffering. Oswald, unfortunately, recognizes this futile wish.

Damn it. He had so  _ not _ wanted to feel kinship with this miscreant.

“I was going to drink a bottle of,” he gestures,  _ “whatever _ I could get and wander the city until the school’s locker rooms opened up and I could take a shower.”

Oswald raises his eyebrows, almost impressed.  _ Great _ plan.

“Well. I’m sure there’s another store around here that will sell to you, if you’d like to go ahead with all that and get yourself shanked in the gutter.” His company gifts him with a sardonic look before righting himself, scrubbing at his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket and clumsily shoving the fake into one of his jean pockets. Before he can actually go anywhere or make any move toward the next step in this brilliant scheme, however, Oswald has pity. 

_ “Or... _ well, I’m still not selling that swill to you, but… I am closing up shop soon.” This is not strictly true. A glance at the clock tells him that the time is hovering just around midnight; all else being equal, Oswald still has nearly six hours to sit here before the morning shift would arrive and he’d normally, blessedly, be free to go.

He’s feeling wild and dangerous tonight.

“My apartment is, um, empty, and it isn’t much, but if you’d like….” This offer is much harder to spit out than he anticipated it would be. This is on account of it being batshit insane. “Well, it probably beats sleeping drunk on a park bench. If you want.”

Oswald has no idea why he’s feeling so shy, why the hell it should matter, one way or another, if this boy accepts his offer. It  _ does, _ though. To him… and to his tentative guest, too.

The boy looks at him  _ differently, _ now. It’s subtle, and Oswald wouldn’t call it “awe,” exactly (no one, ever, has been in  _ awe _ of him), but he does look… subdued. Defanged.  _ Curious. _

“Are you offering what I think you’re offering?” he asks, all hints of antagonism gone the way of Oswald’s brief, insane power trip with the shotgun.

Recognizing just a little too late an open-ended mistake in his offer that he should have guarded himself against, Oswald shuts down a little. 

“A roof for one night,” he clarifies, terse, as he withdraws physically: folding down and protecting his vitals without even really thinking about it. How telling, this stance. Oswald hates what it says, what it  _ reveals, _ about him, but he hates feeling vulnerable more. “That’s it.”

Still studying him with something like wonder, the boy gives no indication that he notices Oswald’s silent announcement. 

“That’s… look, you don’t have to…”

“I don’t,” Oswald says with finality, making the decision for both of them, “but what the hell. Do you want to buy anything I won’t have to card you for, or can we get out of here?”

“No, let’s… wait a second.” The guy pauses, darting over to the aisles to grab a box of something that he quickly slaps on the counter, digging back in his pockets for crumpled bills which get the same treatment.

Oswald picks up the box to ring it, and sees, with some small curiosity—a fruit pie. Huh.

“Keep the change,” says his guest as Oswald pops the register, “and the receipt. I just want to get out of this place.”

Oswald can’t say that he disagrees with the sentiment. His stranger waiting by the door, he goes through the bare bones of something like closing tasks (doing not much more, in the process, than locking the register, killing the lights, and dragging out the rusted gate across the building’s facade) and then steps out into the streets of the city, a light mist drizzling on his head and an unfamiliar step falling in beside his own as they make their way back to his abandoned apartment.

His boss might fire him for that stunt, if he even hears about it. Or he won’t. In this moment, Oswald can’t bring himself to care one way or another. They make it back unmolested, and while they wade through pointless police tape and Oswald turns the four pointless locks “protecting” their balsa wood front door, he’s thinking about spare blankets and amenities while his guest, he supposes, is reflecting on the events that brought him here.

Oswald has just turned the final key when he’s stopped by a hand on his shoulder, a voice that is strangely urgent. “My name  _ is _ James, you know. Jim. That part of the ID wasn’t fake.”

Oswald tucks this information away with a raise of his eyebrows, and then he swings open the door with as much fanfare as the pathetic room beyond it can justify.

“Well, Jim,” he says, his smile rueful. “Welcome home. Mi casa es su casa.”

The apartment is, admittedly, a shithole. Introducing it to company for the first time in—well, probably ever, Oswald is forced to see it not as a reluctant inhabitant but as a host, and these new eyes do not particularly like what they see. The furniture isn’t shabby, really, but it  _ is _ ancient, all of it his mother’s mother’s, brought over from the old country and now collecting about a decade’s worth of dust on top of lace doilies. Beyond that, there are knocked over bits and broken baubles from the police intrusion the day before, and an egregious bloodstain in the kitchen related to the immediate cause of the incident. 

Mother had been going through a rough patch recently, he would admit, but Oswald had been  _ handling it. _ He had been, except that he was working so much to support them both, and she had finally had an episode when he wasn’t there to do damage control; he suspects that their nosy next-door neighbor, one Ms. Claire Roberts, had been the one to call the police on her. If he ever gets any definitive proof of that… well.

Oswald catches himself before he breaks the skin of his palms, digging into them as he is with his squeezed closed fists. It’s not the time to dwell on it right now, he knows, not when there’s nothing at all he can do.

Besides, he has company.

Turning, a little abashedly, to the boy—to  _ Jim, _ Oswald reminds himself—Oswald tries on an apologetic look that he knows makes his face look pained.

“I’ll… admit it’s not much, but—”

“It’s nice,” Jim says, taking everything in. “Cozy.”

That bolsters him a little. “Well! If you’d like, I could turn down the sheets in my bed for you, get some clean ones put on. Oh—and some sleep clothes. If you’d like.”

He would have to wear Oswald’s, but looking at Jim now, Oswald realizes it wouldn’t be such a bad fit. Surprisingly, despite his brutish first impression, Jim isn’t actually all that much bigger than Oswald; he possibly even verges on short. For some reason, that thought—compounded by the thought of this Jim in  _ his _ nightclothes—makes Oswald wrestle with a blush. 

Jim waves him off. 

“Don’t bother. I’ll take the couch, and I don’t mind sleeping in my jeans. Some blankets would be nice, though.”

A little disappointing, that. But only a little. At least the request gives Oswald something to bustle off and go do.

He returns to the living room with a few hand-stitched quilts in his arms, which he trades off without fanfare to James. Desperate to keep in motion, Oswald starts circling the room, resetting things the police had broken or unshelved, picking up to the best of his ability. He should have done this earlier, but… once again, no use worrying about it now.

“Your mom did all this?” Jim asks casually, looking around. Oswald turns sharply, almost outraged, to find that Jim has set down the blankets behind him but is now standing, watching Oswald as he moves around.

He doesn’t know how he feels about that.

_ “No,” _ Oswald says a little too sharply, his mouth pulling into a tight line in his displeasure. “All this damage was those brutish policemen. Mother… she just has these—episodes. She’s not in her right mind; doesn’t know where she is, lashes out in fear. It’s not her fault. And no one ever gets hurt but her.” 

_ And me, _ Oswald thinks but doesn’t voice. It would give the wrong impression… and besides, it’s none of Jim’s business, anyway.

Jim’s face is soft and he tilts his head, taking a step closer. Oswald takes a step back, and specifically does  _ not _ let himself gauge Jim’s reaction as he does so. Why does it matter to him, suddenly? Why does this—all of this—feel so big, when he is standing here, a nobody in a city of nobodies, sharing an inconsequential night with a nobody who might have been somebody, once, but is now a homeless kid trolling for alcohol and surfing on couches?

He shouldn’t feel so grateful for whatever wave carried him into Oswald’s life. Especially not when he’s asking ignorant, invasive questions like this.

“Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything bad about her. Why would the police do this, though? Did she fight?”

Oswald wants to ask if Jim is stupid or just deliberately obtuse, but he chooses instead to opt for a little more tact. He doesn’t want to alienate the guy  _ now, _ after all. Not to mention, for whatever reason, he thinks he wants Jim to understand.

Oswald has never had a friend, besides his mother. He looks at Jim and wonders if maybe that could change.

“Uh, hello? Do you know where we  _ are? _ This is downtown Gotham, practically the Narrows. The police don’t care about us, dummy. All of our things are just ugly garbage to them.” Oswald closes his eyes, massaging his temples. Jim looks troubled, but Oswald suddenly realizes that he doesn’t actually have the energy to work all this out. “I apologize. Hadn’t you better get some rest? If you have school tomorrow and all….”

Oswald starts to go, to retreat into his room and curl up in his bed and try very, very hard not to think about what the stranger in his house is doing at that very moment, but Jim stops him with another light touch to his shoulder before he can get more than a few steps.

“I don’t think I can sleep. Keep me company?”

Considering how little rest Oswald has gotten in the past week, this is a much bigger ask than Jim probably thinks it is, but Oswald finds himself obliging it anyway. He studies his guest’s face for a second (learning it), and then he gives in.

“...Let me go fetch us something to drink.”

And that’s how Oswald finds himself raiding his mother’s liquor cabinet at one in the morning on a Tuesday, ready to drink with a strange boy who had manhandled his person not yet a full hour ago. He feels a little guilty about the whole thing, honestly. It would trouble Mother quite a bit if she knew, but her condition has seemed to deteriorate of late, and it’s been months, maybe years, since she had last been present enough to notice something like depleted alcohol cabinets. No, these days, Oswald has been the adult between the two of them, the one who cooks and cleans and provides, and this thought… he doesn’t want to feel bitter about it, but he does, and when he turns the antique key in the ornate lock, he lets that bitterness justify this one selfish decision.

Oswald returns to the living room with a heavy glass bottle topped with a bird-shaped stopper. The contents are mostly full.

“I hope you don’t mind sherry. It’s all we have left.”

“Never had it,” Jim says bluntly, turning from where he had been mindlessly fidgeting with one of the few intact tchotchkes the cops had deigned to leave them with. He must see the way Oswald’s smile tightens at the corners, because he rushes to cover up the flippant statement with a more courteous, “But I’m sure it’s fine.”

Reviving his somewhat flagged enthusiasm (between the background noise of guilt when he considers that all this probably counts as “doing wrong by his mother” and the disappointment that surged over him when it became woefully apparent that he had only  _ subpar _ liquor to ply on Jim—and hadn’t that been how this whole ordeal got started in the first place?—Oswald’s head is swimming with regrets and questions he doesn’t want to deal with), Oswald sets down the bottle and claps his hands together, desperate to stay in motion.

“Well! I’ll go get us some glasses, and then—”

“Don’t bother.” Jim picks up the bottle and unstops it, downing a long, dramatic pull before shoving it toward Oswald, similarly to how he had the fake ID what seems now like eons ago but without (most of) the aggression. He pats the cushion beside him.

“Sit. Drink.”

Oswald can’t argue with that. He does as he’s told, his mouth on the bottle and eyes closed against the tang of the beverage before his body even hits the pillow. As he drinks, Oswald is intimately aware of the fact that Jim’s mouth had been where his own is now only seconds ago, a fact which should not mean anything to Oswald at all, except that it does.

He finishes his pull and hands the bottle back to Jim, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. How uncouth, but he’s momentarily past caring about that.

The stranger he had inexplicably invited into his home is looking at him with a newfound respect. Oswald isn’t sure he likes it, but his cheeks seem to burn.

The alcohol, then. Must be.

“So, what did you—” Oswald starts at the same time as Jim says, “Was there something—?” 

They glance up at each other, awkward teenagers at their core, and laugh, the tension finally starting to ease.

“Sorry,” Jim says. “You first.”

“No, you first. I insist.”

Raising his eyebrows but conceding the point, Jim takes another swig from the bottle. “Just—anything you wanted to talk about? While we’re here.”

Oswald takes the bottle of sherry before Jim can offer it back to him, drinking deeply again. He’s starting to feel warm, which is good. Soon he won’t have to think so much.

“Tell me what happened,” Oswald says, suddenly daring. “With your girlfriend.”

Hey, he figures, if Jim gets to ask unreasonably personal questions about Oswald’s trauma from the past forty-eight hours….

To his surprise, Jim actually answers him, and not with a threat.

“Stupid.” He shakes his head. “I got into an argument with her dad. Just couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”

Oswald forgets to keep himself carefully as far away from Jim on their shared loveseat  _ (loveseat) _ as he can, turning to study his houseguest—his new friend?  _ that _ must be the alcohol talking—as he hands the bottle back over wordlessly.

“About what?” Remembering his manners, not that it does much good now, Oswald backtracks. “If—if you don’t mind me asking, of course.”

Jim drinks, then continues, his eyes slightly glassy with the recollection. “The guy is an asshole. I’ve pretty much wanted to fight him since the day I met him.”

“My, how out of character for you,” Oswald hums, though he doesn’t know where that overfamiliar  _ boldness _ came from. He’d almost blush, except Jim seems to have either not heard or decided not to acknowledge this jibe.

“But last night, he just…” Jim’s brow furrows. Incredulously, Oswald finds himself wanting to reach over and smooth it out. (A sure sign that he’s already had too much, he always was a lightweight, but when Jim passes the bottle back to him, he does not refuse it.) “Wouldn’t shut up, I guess. Kept going on about some  _ faggot _ he works with, the things he hopes happen to the guy. Wasn’t the first time he went off like that. Hell, it probably wasn’t even the worst shit I’ve heard him say, but… I don’t know. I reached a breaking point, told him how I felt.”

Oswald feels frozen, for reasons he can’t fully explain. Ever since Jim said—well,  _ that, _ Oswald has been cautiously motionless, like it is very important that he give off no cues one way or another, lest he reveal something about himself in the process that he does not want known. Still, he can’t stop his tongue when he finds himself asking, “And how  _ did _ you feel?”

“Sick. Tired, I guess. Tired of biting my tongue while douchebags like him get to say whatever the hell they want.”

Something blooms, then, in Oswald. As he had, entering the apartment for the first time in his life with a friend to show it to, Oswald suddenly looks at Jim himself with new eyes—and this time, what he sees is not found lacking.  _ A white knight, _ Oswald thinks, mooning hopelessly. He had been self-sufficient for so long, he’d almost forgotten what it was like to want a protector. 

Though Oswald is too lost in sticky, gushing feelings to spur him on, Jim continues. Oswald is gratified at that—he’s learning very quickly that he simply likes to hear the boy speak.

The mystery of his petrification toward this topic is no mystery at all. Oswald is only surprised to figure it out so late—he’s usually much more perceptive than this lifelong exercise in denial would suggest. Then again, he supposes he can’t be  _ entirely _ to blame for that; he is hurtling recklessly and dangerously toward drunk. Jim takes another swig and then lets the increasingly  _ less _ heavy bottle hang loosely in his grip; Oswald takes it from him gently, swigging himself and relishing the light burn down the back of his throat.

“He had all sorts of things to say about me then, of course.”

“Of course,” Oswald murmurs.

“Told me I was insolent… called me a queer. Threatened to beat the shit out of me, too, until his wife stepped in. Then he threw me out, obviously. All that wasn’t so bad. Honestly, I wish he  _ had _ taken a swing at me. The worst part was when Chrissy—uh, my girlfriend—stopped me at the door. Went off on me for talking to dear old Dad like that.”

“She broke up with you?” Oswald supplies. Jim nods, reaching blindly for the bottle.

They’re quiet for a long minute while Jim drinks and stares in his unhappiness and Oswald sits feigning unconcern and worrying at his revelation, trying to figure out how it all fits together right here and now. What he’s going to do about it.

The smart answer is  _ nothing, _ but. 

“Well,” Oswald says at length, “It sounds to  _ me _ like you’re better off without her.”

Jim stares off for another long moment before finally snapping himself back to reality. 

“Yeah. Probably.” 

He drinks. Works his jaw. Oswald, ever perceptive, begins to suspect he’s trying to work up the courage or the level of inebriety required to say something brave or stupid or inconsequenital, in the way that brave and stupid things, both, often turn out to be. He rather finds he’d like to hear it, so he’s quiet. He waits.

In the end, though, Jim just sighs.

“Damn. You made it sound so easy—my other friends, they’d be telling me to grovel and win her back right now.”

It isn’t what Oswald had… hoped? anticipated?  _ half believed _ he might hear, but it does let his mind rest a little easier, at least. Like he’s let out a long held breath, a sigh of relief and disappointment at once.

“Well, I imagine I’m not much like your other friends,” Oswald says. He takes a sip, smaller this time, and tries to make it a neutral statement.

Jim looks at Oswald then, studying him for what might be just one second too long. “No,” he at last concedes. “You’re not.”

Oswald offers a little, rueful half-smile. Jim doesn’t quite look away. “I told you shit tonight I wouldn’t have told any of them, shit they wouldn’t have  _ listened to _ if I said it.” He meets Oswald’s eyes like a challenge, but they’re long past fighting now.

“I’m a good listener,” Oswald says softly. They’re almost—dare he say it—having a moment, like a spell has set down over them, but then Jim reaches out to take the bottle, still looking at Oswald, refusing to break away, raises the bottle up to his mouth, and—

And pulls back, his concentration switched like train tracks onto the lack of sherry currently entering his mouth.

The bottle is empty. The fact strikes Oswald as quite funnier than it usually would be, which is how he finally realizes he’s drunk. A giggle escapes him before he can keep it under lock. Looking up, almost startled, Jim lets out an embarrassed, laugh-adjacent noise of his own, and then they’re both cackling.

“I didn’t even know we were close,” Jim admits once they begin to cool down. Another laugh fights its way out of his throat as he continues. “Shit. Maybe I had more than I thought.”

This appeals especially to Oswald, who breaks out in another bout of hilarity before fighting for composure enough to say, “And you were going to drink  _ whiskey?” _

They look at each other for a second and laugh all over again.

“Until—until you pulled a  _ gun _ on me, sure,” Jim manages, and Oswald half falls off of the loveseat 

_ (loveseat) _

at the thought. He had, hadn’t he? It should, but does not, occur to him how very strange this would have seemed to the boy he had been only a little more than an hour before, his hand searching blindly for the trigger of that gun. How long had it been since that overworked, undernourished boy even genuinely  _ smiled, _ when now laughter feels so right and easy?

Oswald has forgotten to be tired. If asked about the distinction, he would have only to point out that there’s something about Jim.

“I was having—” Oswald chokes out, “—a rough night.”

That seems to sober Jim up, just a touch. His wide grin settles into more of a knowing smirk, and he stands, patting his pockets for something with one hand and holding out the other to help Oswald to his feet.

“We all were. Wanna have a smoke?”

Jim lights up on the apartment’s impossibly narrow balcony—just barely wide enough for the two of them to stand shoulder to shoulder—leaning his weight on the railing and gazing down on Gotham’s slums below. The stars in the sky are obscured by light pollution, and the air is cool, verging on cold. They are, for the moment, the only two people in the world.

The only two people in  _ Gotham, _ which is practically the same thing.

Oswald does not smoke, as a general rule. It’s not that he’s morally opposed, or any such nonsense, he just doesn’t have the taste for it—not to mention the  _ funds _ that supporting a substance habit would sap. He’s never been entirely straight and narrow, but from time to time he is, can be, prim.

Jim savors the smoke in his lungs and the living proof of an oral fixation on his lips, though, and Oswald knows, before he breathes in a molecule of nicotine, that he’s been caught addicted. Hook, line, and sinker.

_ Tobacco _ isn’t the vice he’s indulging tonight.

“It’s funny,” Jim breathes on his extended exhale. “’Cause I meant what I said in there. I don’t think I would have told any of my—” he stops, catches himself clumsily before he says “real friends,” although they both know that’s what he means,  _ “other _ friends what I told you. But I don’t even  _ know _ you.”

He’s most pointedly not looking at Oswald as he says this, just blowing it up into the smog of Gotham, eyes out on street lamps and oblivion.

“It’s easier to tell things to strangers,” Oswald replies. “My reaction has no real effect on your life. Why should it? We  _ don’t _ know each other. We’ll likely never again talk after tonight.”

Oswald forces a false joviality into the words that he suspects does nothing to hide the bitter disappointment that they inexplicably light in him. Once again, Jim disarms him with an honest answer.

“I want to know you, though.”

He takes another drag on his cigarette. Oswald breaks off his staring contest with the blank pane of a neighbor’s window to look at him and stare.

“You want to know  _ what?” _

“Anything. Your life story. Your favorite movie. What you want to do when you get away from all this.” He pauses, considering. “Your  _ name _ would be good, for starters.”

Oswald realizes, belatedly, that he never got around to mentioning it. Weirdly, this feels significant and immutable.

“Call me John,” Oswald says decisively, cutting it off with just a little too much emphasis, his head lolling with the drink. Jim raises an eyebrow at him.

“John. John what?”

“John Doe. Oh, don’t give me that,” he slurs, just a little, looking at Jim with a bleary, half-apologetic, half-teasing squint and pointing with a limp arm when Jim tries to protest. “Jim  _ Beam. _ You know it, too: names aren’t important.”

Or they’re  _ too _ important. Oswald still instinctively guards himself, looks out for number one even when his other reckless acts tonight have rendered doing so almost entirely futile, to the point where he verges dangerously on the edge of self harm. It’s not as much of a contradiction as it might seem.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” quoth Jim, though he looks a little put out—unimpressed, maybe. Oswald chooses to ignore it and grins, cheekily.

“Ah—well put. I see you’re a scholar,” he says, elbowing Jim gently and then, only after the fact, remembering why he must not under any circumstances initiate physical touch with James or any other warm male body.

Jim snorts, blowing smoke through his nose. “Hardly. Truth be told, I’m thinking about dropping out.”

Oswald’s brow furrows a bit. “Of… university?” he asks, trying to figure if he’s mentally misjudged the guy’s age. After what he said about locker rooms, he’d been figuring high school for sure, but….

“High school.”

Oswald’s body stiffens a little. He's too caught up in his own memories, suddenly, and this particular situation hits him like a freight train, too close to home. “Why would you do something  _ stupid _ like that?” he asks, almost callous. Oswald doesn’t screen the thought before it leaves his mouth, and he regrets it almost instantaneously. Jim doesn’t get angry, though. Just… ashamed. 

_ Nice going. _

“Nothing there for me,” he says at length, not meeting Oswald’s eye and scratching at the peeling metal of the railing with one fingernail bitten almost to the quick. “You know. Hard to keep up with homework when you’ve got nowhere to do it, I’m failing half my classes anyway. I might as well be working. Then I could get a place for myself. Or….” He hesitates. “I might join the army.”

This draws another uncouth bark of laughter out of Oswald’s chest. “Why am I not surprised,” he asks. A little more seriously, he frowns. “You shouldn’t drop out. Just a few more months, Jim, and then you’ll have a diploma _ —then _ you can go work yourself to death or throw your life away or what have you.”

Jim seems frustrated, his brow furrowing when he takes a final drag on the cigarette before stubbing it out on the rusty metal, leaving the butt to sit smoldering in its ashes. “Whuz—what’s the point? I’m eighteen, and I’m sure as hell not learning anything there.”

Oswald snorts on laughter. “Oh, my dear James. The point was never to  _ learn.” _

He wants to lean into Jim’s chest as he says this, sherry sitting warm in him and making him feel lazy and languid and sleek. He wants to bat at him playfully. He settles for flapping his hand in a dismissive manner.

It’s not enough.

“Surely you’re not so short sighted, Jim? The diploma opens  _ doors. _ The extent of what you can do without it is so limited _ —so _ limited,” Oswald squeezes his eyes shut for a second, then continues, “and you're far too precious to be wasted on the  _ military.” _

Jim tilts his head, considering Oswald.

“You dropped out, didn’t you,” he says, softer than Oswald would have imagined. Oswald’s eyes burn, his face flushes in indignation and he clenches his fists, but as soon as it's come, the fight abandons him and he resigns, admitting: 

“Yes. Last year.”

For a second, Jim seems ready to ask questions or perhaps offer condolences, but either the drink or his disposition snatch the words from his mouth. What he eventually asks instead, then, is, “Wanna light?”

He pulls another cigarette from the carton he’s been fingering. Putting it between his lips and lighting up, Jim takes a long, slow breath before holding it out to Oswald.

Oswald has never smoked a cigarette before, but like hell is he going to  _ admit _ that. He holds out his hand for the thing, determined to get it done; when Jim hands it over, he takes it like he might take a ticking bomb or women’s underwear, pinched between two fingers and held out as far from himself as he can manage.

He must look a sight.

The shame of being thought unknowledgeable in any subject whatsoever outweighs his trepidation about the smoldering cylinder of tar and ash between his fingers. With some bravado, Oswald raises the cigarette to his own lips, sucks in the smoke—

—and then coughs so hard he almost passes out. His lungs are on  _ fire, _ and he can’t honestly quantify what’s worse—the fact that he might die from this, or the fact that he’ll look like a fool while doing so. Oswald has enough presence of mind to pray, but not enough that the prayers are anything more than strung together sequences of “please,” “God,” and “death;” distantly, as Oswald starts to retain enough fresh air (well, fresh for Gotham city, anyway) to come back to himself, he becomes aware that this fit must have alarmed James, who seems to be murmuring pseudo-soothing nothings at him while thumping on his back in a move that is, to be brutally honest, anything but helpful.

Oswald tries to wave him off, and Jim must get the picture enough to at least back out of Oswald’s space (and why does that feel like such a tragic loss?), staring at him with wide eyes as he coughs, pants, and finally starts to calm down, breathing laboriously.

“...Erm,” Oswald says once he can speak again. “Unbelievable as it might seem, Jim, I—I must admit, I haven’t done this before.” 

Momentary fear that he had sent his host into a fatal asthma attack apparently abating, Jim relaxes against the rickety balustrade again, barking out a laugh. “No shit.”

Raising his eyebrows, Jim gives Oswald a halfway admonishing glance and holds out his hand to take back the fag. 

“You shouldn’t start; they’re terrible for you. Sorry, I thought—”

“No, wait. Now it’s a matter of pride, I simply  _ must _ redeem myself.”

The look on Jim’s face is no less strange after Oswald says this, but it might be slightly amused, or something not unlike it. Oswald stares back, refusing to be cowed, and then they break off, laughing at each other for a moment (which plays hell on Oswald’s aching lungs, but who gives a shit, and he’s drunk) before Jim looks at him more seriously, almost entranced, and takes the cigarette back.

“Let’s try something else. Do you trust me?”

It’s such a laughable question—Oswald wouldn’t even give this boy his  _ name, _ they never talked before tonight and most likely never will again come morning, he pulled a gun on him not so long ago… and yet—that Oswald is thrown for a loop and ends up circling back around to total honesty.

“Yes,” he breathes, mooning again, hard enough to put the Gotham night sky to shame.

“Come here,” Jim says despite their already sweltering proximity, elbows pressed together where they recline against the rail—and then he takes a long drag on the cigarette, holds it in his mouth, and leans in.

It isn’t until Jim’s mouth is actually on his that Oswald realizes what he’s trying to do, and he only ends up responding correctly by complete accident; Oswald opens his mouth to gasp, which allows the smoke in from Jim’s mouth—Jim’s mouth which is  _ touching Oswald’s mouth, _ which is, for all extents and purposes,  _ kissing _ him—and down to his lungs, where it burns, but not so bad as before, and he holds that breath for a long time before he remembers how to exhale. 

There’s a kick in his chest, a thrilling high, and it has nothing to do with nicotine.

Jim lingers, face very close, for nearly the whole duration of that electric moment wherein Oswald has forgotten how to breathe and lost entirely the ability to think. He is still close,  _ very _ close, when Oswald’s short-circuiting systems start to function again, and with a guardedly unguarded look in his eye, he whispers, “Better?”

Oswald’s eyes are saucers, wide and blank and with not even a hint of their usual uncanny intelligence, totally open and vulnerable like he hates being, generally.

Speaking is out of the question, but at long last he manages movement beyond the involuntary, and slowly, very slowly, nods his head. That seems to be the encouragement that Jim needs to ask the question he  _ really _ wants to ask, a hand brushing one of Oswald’s but too hesitant to take it, which is, “Was that… okay?”

Oswald nods again, vigorously this time, and it looks like Jim might have another hesitant, stunted, sherry-flavored question to stumble though, but Oswald doesn’t get to hear it, because before Jim can try, he’s got his hands buried in sandy hair and his mouth crushed to Jim’s, and he’s kissing him very hard in a way that exposes all of his inexperience, his boldness attempting to make up for it but the insecure (anticipatory, wincing,  _ terrified) _ way Oswald’s eyes are squeezed closed betraying  _ that _ and setting him back at square one.

He jerks back almost as soon as he’s done it, eyes circle-wide again and staring, gaping, saliva on his mouth. A question of his own, a challenge, a plea for mercy, lies unsaid. Well? Oswald would ask if he had a tongue to do so. Was that what you meant? Do you want me?

Jim, as it turns out,  _ does. _ He stares back at Oswald for a long moment—and if Oswald’s expression was moony, Jim’s contains every star hidden behind city pollution tonight, clear as the countryside, constellations (a whole goddamn Milky Way) of wow, of  _ something, _ dancing there as he stares back as Oswald, and then, someone—maybe Jim, maybe Oswald, maybe the both of them together at the exact same time—snaps, and they’re on each other again, kissing hard and quick and right there on Oswald’s crappy balcony. He likes this, theoretically. Let the whole city see it (or, the whole fire escape his building looks out on); he’s got this pretty boy, and for this one, singular moment, this pretty boy is his, wants him, wants Oswald….

It’s unthinkable.

So he doesn’t think.

In that moment, Oswald just  _ does, _ as he so rarely allows himself to do; he kisses and experiments and melts and bites, shifting with Jim as they meet each other in a rhythm, a heartbeat. Oswald loses himself and finds Jim, and it’s absurd, he must be dreaming—must have fallen asleep counting cigarette cartons back at the drugstore and will probably wake up to find that all their liquor has been stolen to a drop and not only will Joe fire him, he’ll press charges for loss recovery—but if that’s the case, Oswald figures he deserves this fantasy, deserves this last good thing before his life does what it’s been threatening to do since perhaps the day he was born and falls apart around him, and so he throws himself into it as hard as he can, throws himself at James as hard as he can, and James throws himself back, and the collision is rough, sometimes speaking of the scrape of teeth and an accidental (or “accidental”) nip here and there and Jim’s strong hands traveling up under Oswald’s shirt and grabbing him, pleasant and welcome but  _ grabbing, _ like he’s an anchor or perhaps Jim is simply proprietary, and  _ that _ thought makes a thrill go down Oswald’s spine—all this sweet violence in Oswald’s first real kiss (as he had been kissed before, technically, but always with a justification as to why it didn’t count, why he was allowed to continue holding out for a romantic fantasy he wasn’t fit for and probably didn’t deserve but was receiving now; it was his mother, say, or else he hadn’t wanted it, had been repulsed by the kisser and held still under duress), the gentlest pain setting Oswald’s nerves alight and his mind at ease, because you can’t feel pain in dreams, which means improbably, impossibly, he must be awake.

Jim moves like a man experienced and frantic, and Oswald less so; he  _ wants _ Jim, wants him hot and hard and  _ now, _ but still feels himself setting a gentler pace, languidly pressing into Jim as he’d have liked to earlier, his hands stationary where Jim’s are roaming—one still pulling at Jim’s nice hair, the other rested on his waist, failing to resist the urge to pull him closer and closer and  _ mine. _

They’re in heaven. They’re in a Gotham back alley, three stories up.

They’re the only two people in the world, until they aren’t.

The light goes on in the apartment building beside theirs, a bare hint of a warning that Jim catches first, eyes darting to the sudden change in his peripheral vision and mouth pulling away from Oswald’s, just slightly, for the first time since it found him. Annoyed by the loss of stimulus, Oswald first blindly chases the warmth, then blearily opens his eyes to see what it is that could  _ possibly _ interest Jim more than Oswald’s tonsils, which he’d been trying for so desperately just seconds before.

He looks up right into the eyes of neighboring busybody, Claire Roberts.

Oswald isn’t even surprised, not really. Between her flare for the dramatic and her desperate need to be some sort of romantic victim, he has no doubt that Ms. Roberts heard vague noises, perhaps their masculine voices low in the Gotham City alleyway, and rushed to do up her hair in curlers and wrap her body in a lavish robe, dolled up and perfectly frazzled on the chance that she might wander onto a crime and inevitably be comforted by concerned neighbors and grateful policemen like the heroic, fragile witness that she was.

Body still sprawled over Jim’s like something obscene, Oswald’s first bad instinct is to do a cheeky little finger wave at her that will surely come back to bite him when he’s alone and sober and angry at this bitch who probably institutionalized his mother again. So he does. Oswald doesn’t quite have it in him to be angry—like, actually furious in the way this woman’s actions deserve—right now, so he’ll get his kicks on driving her to that brink, instead.

She just gapes at him, like the scene couldn’t possibly be real. I know, right? Oswald wants to say, but doesn’t, just drops his head to the crook of Jim’s neck while Jim awkwardly nods to her, the fakest of fake smiles plastered to his face, already urging Oswald back into the apartment before Oswald’s body has picked up the memo.

“Nice night,” Jim offers as a parting pleasantry, and then his hand is gripped tight around Oswald’s, and he pulls them inside and the door closed behind them in one motion too fluid to have come from a boy as drunk as he must, by all rights, still be.

Threshold crossed, Oswald and Jim stare at each other in horror for a second before the absurdity of that exchange catches up to them and they burst out into another bout of laughter that quickly verges on hysterical. They’re still laughing when Jim, inspired by this burst of joviality, pulls Oswald by the hand that he’s not yet let go of (and why does simply holding this boy’s hand feel more intimate and special, why does it light him up and burn him, even more than swallowing his spit had a few moments ago?) over to the little sofa, where they topple off balance into a pile of limbs and linens, and then the laughter lets up, because Oswald is sprawled over Jim and looking down on him, barely raised up on his elbows enough to study Jim’s pretty, too-close face, and he moons, he  _ stars, _ his breath catches and the planets align and then just like that, they’re tearing at each other just as they had been, gunshot momentum not dissipated in the least.

There must be something about the loveseat  _ (loveseat, _ although the repetition of its name feels substantially more trivial when it’s actually being used as the name implies), perhaps the horizontal position he’d maneuvered them into, because Jim’s wandering hands quickly roam  _ down, _ now, rather than up, and even from where Oswald’s sitting, the unmistakable truth of Jim’s burgeoning hardon is pretty much impossible to miss.

Oswald expects a stab of terror at that, but it never comes. Maybe it’s the sherry, maybe he’s just better at repression than he thought, but knowing that Jim is growing hard, that he’s growing hard over this, over  _ him, _ hard because he’s kissing Oswald Cobblepot and the effects are overwhelming, just makes Oswald feel warm and smug and not a little bit turned on himself. Given their proximity, given that they’ve ended up curled together on top of the pile of spare blankets Oswald dragged out for him, Jim halfway sitting up and Oswald in his lap, hips rolling and moving into a makeshift rhythm with Jim’s, this means that Jim must know, too, and he does.

He has his hand halfway under Oswald’s waistband (the pants he wore to work this morning; ugly slacks he’d bought second-or-third hand and still had to scrounge for) when he stops, his big, sincere eyes catching Oswald’s and asking another monumental question.

Jim asks this one with his mouth, too. Such is the weight.

“Is this okay? I mean it—we can slow down if it’s not. Or stop. It’s up to you.”

Maybe Oswald should think harder about this, should pause and employ his good, rational sense (the good sense that’s kept him  _ alive _ in the world up until now) and consider the relative merits of  _ not _ letting some perfect stranger who almost hauled him over the counter at a Kinsley & Darling’s earlier tonight get his hands on his dick. Yes, maybe. Probably. Definitely. But, Oswald let go of that option multiple drinks ago, pushed it out and said good riddance when he pulled Jim into that hard first kiss, and right here, right now, all he wants is to trust him, trust this boy he doesn’t know but would like to, trust that there is a person in this world besides his mother who does not want any harm to come to him. Who can bear to put their hands on him, and not to maim.

He wants to believe it so much that he almost does, and so what Oswald says, not even a full pause after Jim gives him a dangling out, is, “It’s more than  _ okay.” _

Memories he hadn’t touched and hadn’t hoped to catch him on the last word. Trying not to choke up, not to panic, he adds, his voice smaller, “Just be gentle with me?”

He knows what Jim probably reads into the statement—compounded on his inexperience with kissing, the request must make him look very much like the blushy virgin he’ll let himself pretend he is, if only for one night. Jim’s touch goes from demanding and hungry, then, to soft, a caress rather than a grope, and Oswald thinks he could cry.

“Hey,” Jim breathes, turning Oswald’s face so that the two of them are captured in the affectionate echo chamber of each other’s wide eyes. “I’m going to take care of you, alright? I’m gonna make you feel  _ good.” _

There’s a peace on Jim’s face that Oswald hadn’t seen there before, when he says this. In that moment, Oswald understands something new about James, and about sex. (He’s clever that way.) He understands that, unlike him, Jim sees sex as something probably sacred and doubtlessly  _ meaningful, _ that it gives him a brief purpose and that he doesn’t engage in it unless he’s convinced himself that it’s love.

A bottle of sherry can convince a lot of people of a lot of things. Still, it remains true that, according to this logic, Jim has convinced himself that he is in love with Oswald.

He sees sex as an act of service, feels good when his  _ partner _ feels good because it’s proof he can bring them joy, that he’s good and useful and that he has something to give them. This is probably just about as unhealthy as Oswald’s total emotional disconnect from the act, from the way that, of necessity, he’s already come to view it as just another tool he may utilize. For Jim, sex has taken on too much of a role, and Oswald can see, then, how this might make him inclined to have too much of it, to prove to himself he’s got worth by the force of another’s orgasm. Oswald does not know Jim, but in this moment, drink-deadened fingers fumbling with his belt, he knows this: Jim is probably inclined toward promiscuity  _ (sluttiness,  _ his mind supplies), and Oswald has an intense, irrational desire to protect him from himself and anyone who would ever dare take advantage of that flaw in his nature.

But first, he wants  _ Jim. _ So.

Jim finally makes progress on Oswald’s pants, pulling the belt from its loop, while Oswald makes no move toward Jim’s. He’ll just wait, he decides, wait and see what it takes—and in the meantime, well. It wouldn’t hurt to explore, just a little. His hands—his clever, long fingers made for piano playing and the picking of thorny stems—tentatively run up Jim’s sides, first over the t-shirt he’s donning and then under it, pushing up the cheap fabric until Jim gets the hint and shrugs out of the shirt entirely, and Oswald’s got a good view of Jim’s pretty chest and stomach.

He almost wishes he hadn’t. Jim is still slightly on the small side, doesn’t quite have the muscular definition of a 6-pack, but he’s very clearly in good shape, athletic—Oswald knows  _ why _ this boy is popular, just as well as some part of him knows intrinsically that he must be. This is all well and good, except it serves as an unwelcome reminder about Oswald’s own body: his pigeon-chested torso and all the places where he’s bones and Jim is muscle, and all the places where he’s soft and Jim is flat. It makes Oswald want to cross his arms over his chest and refuse to lose his shirt, except that when Jim takes the long glance at Jim’s chest as encouragement to start peeling Oswald’s shirt over his head, it’s easier to just go along with it.

_ Just don’t look, _ he thinks. Concessions like that feel all too familiar, but this does not: when Jim flings aside Oswald’s oversized work shirt, his eyes rake Oswald’s body, but they end up on Oswald’s face, and he not only sees but  _ acknowledges _ the discomfort there.

Jim stops moving again, a steadying hand bracing Oswald’s bare arm just around his skinny bicep.

“Hey. You okay? What’s wrong?”

Oswald looks away for a moment, frozen by mortification, but the warmth traveling his veins at that small kindness—at being recognized, at being considered as a not-inconsequential part in someone else’s quest for self-gratification—thaws him out quickly enough. It’s… difficult, but he bares a painful smile at Jim.

“Sorry—I’m sorry. It’s stupid. I’m just a little ashamed of…,” he gestures at his bare torso with a free hand, “how I must look to you.”

Eyes a little sad and honest wide, Jim closes them to lean in and kiss at Oswald’s neck, nuzzling his face there and melting, melting, melting. “You’re beautiful,” he says like a secret—like a prayer—against Oswald’s skin.

He shivers. It’s probably a line, something Jim can’t help but say—running on instinct and sex glands—when he gets this worked up, something completely unreflective of his actual opinions on Oswald’s body, but it makes Oswald feel less mortifyingly self-conscious, anyway. When Jim’s hand travels up and down Oswald’s side, petting and stroking and maybe  _ enjoying, _ it doesn’t feel like he’s being lied to.

Jim maps him like it’s essential to living, and Oswald is content to just sit there and let him, his head still heavylight from the alcohol and thrown back as he moans. They might sit like that forever, mostly clothed and panting, Jim kissing and mouthing at the skin of Oswald’s neck and shoulder until he’s marked a medley of striking reds and purples, except just by accident, Jim’s hand, running up Oswald’s belly, happens to hit one of the less pleasant bruises that marks him, and Oswald can’t help a minute wince.

Jim stills again, just as quickly as last time, and another rush of something stronger than affection, tighter than loyalty, spreads through Oswald’s chest. Who has ever been so mindful of his pain? It’s the rock bottom of human decency, it shouldn’t win Jim any meaningful points, and yet.

Oswald shouldn’t have brought him here. And yet.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No,” Oswald grits. “Just pressed on a sore spot. Keep going, please.”

He bares his neck for the marking (and oh, if he had wondered about Jim’s proclivity toward propriety  _ before), _ but Jim has pulled back a little, taking Oswald in again. This time, he squints through his double vision and the dim light of the antique lamps (the only light source still working in the Kapelput apartment just now) and sees what he missed before—the partially faded, mottled bruising that ranges from just under Oswald’s ribcage down his side and around to his hip. He darts his eyes up to Oswald’s face, brow furrowed, possibly in anger.

He’s looking at the black eye, Oswald realizes.

“Did… did the police do this?” he asks, fingers unconsciously ghosting the damage. Oswald almost laughs.

_ “Someone’s _ finally catching on, hmm? There may be hope for you yet,” he teases, trying to relax. Draping his arms over Jim’s shoulders, Oswald gifts him with a quick kiss, but pulls back just enough to speak. “But, no. I can thank them for the black eye, but  _ these _ wounds happen to be a little older.”

Jim looks at him, concerned and expectant. Oswald doesn’t want to say, doesn’t want to remember his humiliation, but finally he gives in; he’d never gotten the chance to tell his mother about the beating, which means that currently, he and Jim (and the boys who did it, but Oswald isn’t exactly quick to include them in his calculations) are the only ones in the world who know. 

“Last week, I found myself cornered by a group of brutes from my old alma mater, just outside the establishment where I seek employment during my daylight hours. They were… that is, I was… well. It was four on one, and  _ I _ was the one. I imagine you can fill in the details.”

“They beat you,” Jim says, voice deceptively soft for the righteous anger in his eyes and the malicious event he’s recounting. “Why?”

Oswald pulls back a little more, studiously not looking at Jim as he tries to brush off the question, or, more accurately, the weight of the response. “Oh, for the same reason your ex-future-father-in-law wanted his coworker dead, I imagine” Painfully casual, Oswald shrugs. “Or perhaps they saw me through the window and remembered how easy I was to get a laugh out of. Really, it’s beyond me why those apes do any of what they do.”

“Who were they,” Jim growls, hips no longer jerking because his concentration has been torn from sex to  _ vengance— _ a good look on him, by all accounts. Oswald rolls his eyes outwardly, but on the inside, his heart sings.

“Why? Are you going to get revenge for me, James? Be my  _ white knight?” _ Oswald asks, pressing two fingers to Jim’s lips to shut him up for the time being. Actually, Jim doing exactly that is everything Oswald has ever dreamed of, but even if the offer is there, it’s too good to be true. Better to shut it down now, before Oswald gets his heart broken. 

“It doesn’t matter who they were. They’re not here now, are they? But you are…” he breaks off, ducking his head to Jim’s bare collarbone to first simply mouth at it, press his tongue flat against Jim and taste him, vaguely salty and lightly addictive, and then nip before coming up for air. “...And I am. So what are you going to do about  _ that, _ tough guy?”

It’s a distraction, and it’s a challenge, and it’s only a few degrees removed from a whining plea. Oswald has never considered it before, but he is not above begging to get what he wants.

Jim doesn’t make him, though. He simply establishes and maintains eye contact, not exactly joyful but not displeased, more… contemplative. Oswald would, theoretically, like to know what Jim is thinking, but for the first time, he finds that the pursuit of knowledge can wait. Jim holds that eye contact, an acknowledgement, perhaps, until he nods just slightly like a bow in surrender and crushes Oswald’s mouth to his, angling  _ up _ to meet him and pulling away almost as soon as he’s done it.

Now it’s Jim’s turn to moon.

Oswald doesn’t think he ever expected to see the day, and it’s all he can do to frame Jim’s face in his hands and lean down to meet it, kissing him like romance, like he’s more than a stranger, like they’ve known each other since the dawn of time and will continue their association long after the sun burns out.

Ha, ha.

If Oswald thinks like that, he’ll probably cry, so it’s good that he is doing no thinking whatsoever, just cradling Jim’s face with one hand and letting the other one travel down, fumbling with the button of Jim’s jeans as Jim does Oswald’s, fumbling until he’s undone them enough to allow himself access to Jim, all of him, and finally take what he came here for.

Jim isn’t very long in following suit. He takes Oswald in his hand and moves like he relishes that, hand stroking very lightly up and down at first, Jim still drowning in Oswald’s mouth, and Oswald, ever the adapter, trying to mirror him, hands a little shaky but with clever, clever fingers; always one of his prouder traits and now uniquely applicable. Jim sinks farther back against the overstuffed cushions and half-folded linens (Oswald had never understood the eroticism in the term  _ “love nest” _ before, but...), moaning. Oswald almost mourns the loss of his mouth, but before this train of thought can leave the station, Jim tightens his grip and adjusts his angle, and Oswald is hit by a supernova of feelings, not one of which is funerary. 

It’s a little embarrassing to react this strongly to what essentially boils down to being jerked off, an exercise in mutual masturbation at best, but to be fair, Oswald is still quite drunk, and, though he  _ has _ masturbated (him being, at the end of the day, a teenage boy), those events were few and far between, and never more than a rush to finish, the end result being a brief respite, not a drawn out expectation for ecstasy. 

And it had never been someone else’s hand on his cock, either. Particularly not a desirable prettyboy who made noise as to wanting to protect him from tormentors.

A surge of pleasure flies through Oswald unbidden at that, hips bucking so hard he nearly overbalances onto Jim, who catches him by the shoulder with one hand, breathing irregular. Oswald gazes at him and loves, and when it becomes apparent that he isn’t going to sprawl out completely, Jim gazes back, the hand on his shoulder repositioning to cup the back of Oswald’s head, tilting their foreheads together so that his breath is hot on Oswald’s face. It smells of cigarettes and booze and Oswald still welcomes it wholeheartedly; he hopes the same can be said about Jim and his own.

“Is this good?” Jim asks, panting and grinding into Oswald’s loose grip, eyes alternatively squeezed shut and fluttering open to search Oswald’s expression for truth (the cardinal one he probably finds there being  _ love, love, _ Oswald has never been one to hide affection and now he must be absolutely screaming it from every silent line of his body). “Is this okay?”

_ “Yes,” _ Oswald moans, almost right into Jim’s lips. “Yes, don’t stop, so good,  _ Jim…” _ He has to catch his breath, and he feels Jim’s smile hum like a low-watt lightbulb, proud of himself, pleased. He wants to make Jim feel like he feels. He wants them both to feel like this forever. “Can I—?”

Oswald experimentally squeezes his grip on Jim’s cock, just a little tighter than he’d dared before, and Jim gasps, dropping his forehead to Oswald’s shoulder and nodding vigorously, apparently at a loss for words. So Oswald does, speeding up and going harder, trying for different twists of his wrist like he can feel Jim—evidently old hat in the art of jerking off—doing for him. The nervous sweat on his eternally-clammy palms provides a slick that Oswald is somewhat grateful for, for once, as he worries about this hurting, but Jim makes no indication of any pain, looks lost in overwhelming  _ pleasure, _ in fact, and this—Oswald is making Jim feel good, and that feels good, and on top of that Jim is making Oswald feel good and is getting off on it, and that thought, the culmination of  _ all _ of these thoughts, is sending Oswald spiraling closer and closer to the edge.

As Jim gets closer himself, he pulls and burrows and generally makes the room between his body and Oswald’s as negligible as possible. Truthfully, this is a little inconvenient in the pursuit of their stated goal—having less room to maneuver makes the actual jerking off part of what they’re doing more difficult, not to mention the unintended consequence of Oswald becoming far more in danger of brushing his bruises with his elbow as he tries to work around them—but Oswald thinks back on his earlier revelation about Jim and sex and understands this development completely; Jim likes this, he clearly enjoys sex, but what he’s really chasing is intimacy, an elusive human connection. He pulls Oswald’s scrawny chest to his so they’re flush, skin to barred skin, and that, more than Oswald’s hand on his cock or even his hand on Oswald’s, is what’s pushing him. Jim is starved for touch and wants someone to hold him, wants, on a level he probably doesn’t even acknowledge, to be protected just like Oswald does, a remnant of a time long past and a self undamaged, and he thinks he can only get that in moments like these. Oswald would like to prove him wrong, but then, what’s Oswald to him?

He would say “a sexual conquest,” but he’s sure Jim believes in no such thing. Not on a level he would admit to, at any rate.

So Oswald just nestles forward, presses his full bodyweight into Jim and the (loveseat), and luxuriates, face buried once again in the crook of Jim’s neck, breathing shallow.

“James,” he murmurs, “James, Jim,  _ Jim—!” _

He sees stars. Oswald’s hand goes totally lax where it moved in no particular hurry on Jim just seconds before, his body goes rigid, and Jim is kissing his skin everywhere he can reach it, talking to talk. “That’s it, I got you, sweetheart, just let go, I’ve got you….”

Oswald has never, ever, felt so good. He doesn’t even really think it was the orgasm that did it, not as much as it was Jim’s simple presence, the sound of his voice, the warmth of his body. All he’s wanted for so long—no matter how much he tried to swallow it down, push it under self-sufficiency and the idea that he’s better off on his own, just him and Mother, who he has to provide for—is a friend, and Jim is it, an improbable presence, a guardian angel working him through the best orgasm he’s had in his brief, tumultuous life.

Oswald’s brain is blank for a second, a completely cleared slate, and when he comes back to himself, he feels drugged up—which, to be fair, he is, they both are—and fucked out, smiling wide and vulnerable and open and unshielded at Jim, who is still hot and bothered and worked up and painfully, achingly hard. Remembering who broke off first, Oswald tries to rectify the situation, reaching to reclaim his grip on Jim. He’s ready to work with heavy, noodle limbs to repay that striking, overwhelming kindness—but Jim stops his hand, kissing him sweaty and sweet and slow as he touches himself, instead.

“Don’t worry about it,” he murmurs into Oswald’s lips, grip far rougher on himself than Oswald would have ever been. “I’ve got it. Relax.”

And Oswald does, sliding halfway out of Jim’s lap to let him have a better angle as he brings himself toward completion, eyes closed in concentration and breath ragged, uneven. He’d like to help, but can see Jim doesn’t need it, and so instead he gives Jim what he does need; Oswald ghosts his lips over Jim’s skin and presses their bodies together, his bones and Jim’s muscles and their sparse allusions to baby fat, Oswald’s eyelashes fluttering on Jim’s cheeks and lips mouthing at his solid jaw.

He half expects Jim to keep babbling through this as he had when Oswald came, to tell Oswald how hot he is, perhaps, keep a running commentary on things he wishes he could do to that pretty mouth or what have you, but he doesn’t—the only sounds Jim makes are completely involuntary, gasps and whimpers and harsh breathing with no rhythm left. This pleases Oswald, because while he was prepared to hear it, he’d found himself somewhat disappointed by that thought, of being a sexual object for Jim’s fantasy. This silence, this quiet, fits the intimate tone they’ve set much better—Oswald wants to work him through this and then have him, clothed and still and warm; he has no desire to reach pornographic fame.

“Thank you,” Oswald breathes against Jim’s face, one hand traveling up his side and the other running through soft hair just behind Jim’s ear. “James. You’re so good at this. You made me feel so good.”

That’s what it takes, apparently, to send Jim over the edge. He comes with not much more than a gasp, a sharp intake of breath near Oswald’s ear, and soon, they sit panting in the afterglow, their universe immeasurably different and exactly the same. Though he hasn’t, though it’s a fake thing and, even if it weren’t, he wouldn’t have it left to give even by virtue of a technicality, Oswald is self-indulgent and wistful, and he lets himself think that he’s given Jim another one of his milestone firsts in this one strange night.

Jim gets his mind back gradually, and they go through the very bare motions of pretending to clean themselves up—buckling the pants they never fully shed and wiping semen on the nearest cloth surface in a move that Oswald’s sure he’ll find completely revolting with the light of day, but can’t bring himself to give a shit about right now. Oswald puts his shirt back on, too, though Jim doesn’t. That’s about as far as they get, and then they’re just sitting there, exhausted and worn out, vaguely hollow, halfway fulfilled.

“So what now,” Jim asks at length, like it isn’t encroaching on four a.m., like Oswald might have another event lined up for them this night. He’s not quite looking at Oswald, perhaps because he’s ashamed, or maybe just because he’s so tired it’s all he can do to keep his eyes open. 

Both options are equally feasible; in the interest of his sweet and hazy good mood, Oswald chooses to accept the latter. He laughs a tired laugh.

“Mmm. I believe a cigarette is traditional, but then we’d be repeating ourselves,” Oswald says. He places a light hand to his chest, still aching with the burn of his throat and lungs not yet recovered. “Not to mention, I don’t think I’d survive it.”

That seems to amuse Jim. He smiles, close-mouthed but knowing, and says, “Probably not.”

An idea lights in his eyes, then, and he snaps his fingers, pointing at Oswald in boyish excitement. 

“I’ve got it.”

Before Oswald can implore him to please, elucidate, he’s scrambling over the back of the loveseat  _ (couch), _ stretching for something on the floor: the too-light windbreaker he’d shucked off after walking into the chilly, dark apartment. Oswald has a second where he panics, wanting to grab Jim by the flank and pull him back over the side of the sofa before he topples foreward and breaks his neck in a fashion that would be improbable elsewhere but which would just about figure in the eternal comedy of errors that is Oswald’s life, but his hand hovers and he draws it back, knowing how foolish the fear ultimately is, and in the end, it doesn’t matter—just seconds later, Jim is sitting right side up again, triumphantly returned with a face reddened from the bloodrush and a small, rectangular box in his hand that is only halfway smashed and which represents the treasure inspiring him to ragdoll over Nagyanya Kapelput’s old furniture, his foot kicked in the air without a thought for dignity.

It’s the snack pie he bought from Oswald at the drugstore. Jim’s eyes twinkle despite the dark circles already forming beneath them, and he looks so unabashedly pleased with himself that Oswald grins, too, indulging the boy’s raised eyebrows and the way his expression couldn’t say “eh? eh?” any better if his mouth was actually forming the words.

“It’ll do,” Oswald sniffs, affecting a false haughtiness that falls apart when Jim, playful now, elbows him, and they both wrestle a bit, laughing. In the brief tussle, the longsuffering box somehow ends up beneath Jim’s back and squashed even further.

No matter. Oswald is sure that he knows Jim well enough by now to anticipate his flippant comment; it’ll still taste the same.

He retrieves the thing before it gets totally flattened and bleeds out onto hapless antique cushions, waving it with mock disapproval in Jim’s face.

“If you want it, you’d better eat it now,” he says, “before it starts seeping from the box.”

Jim takes said box from him and opens it, mostly careful of the cascade of crumbs (which he pops immediately back into his mouth), though not a few escape his fingers and are subsequently left to be ground into the upholstery of the poor victim-of-loveseat. Unsheathing the pocket pie itself, he holds it by both ends, then looks up at Oswald.

“Half?” he offers, already breaking it.

Oh, what the hell. Oswald holds out his hand.

The thing will taste a damn sight better than a cigarette, at any rate. When Oswald is given the last gift of the night courtesy his own Jim Beam, he turns the sorry thing around in his hand. The jelly seeping from the broken end is bright red in the dim light. Huh. For some reason (probably because Jim, for all of his delinquency, still strikes Oswald  _ as American as), _ he expected apple, but this is fine, too. Oswald does not, as a general rule, make it a habit to eat pocket pies in any capacity, so he has no real flavor preference. Not to mention, the cherry has its own merits; glancing up for no reason in particular, Oswald catches sight of Jim’s mouth marked with a smear of it, red like blood and pretty lipstick and cherry pie filling, and if he hadn’t so recently come harder than he ever had in his life, Oswald has a sneaking suspicion that he’d be growing aroused again. Instead, the blood rushes to his face, and he ducks his head and thanks God for the dim light, concentrating on the pie and not the memory as a precaution against heart palpitations.

Oh, he’s got it  _ bad. _

They chew in silence for a minute. It’s so late it’s early now, the preliminary first wave of commuters out of town honking and screeching from what sounds like very far away. Oswald would let sleep take him if it wanted him—though he’s hardly tired anymore, and isn’t  _ that _ strange, when it’s been his constant state of being for who knows how long—but first, there’s one thing that’s on his mind.

“So,” he says without decorum around his final bite of cherry pie, feeling a little warm and smug that this line of questioning even exists to go on.  _ “Sweetheart, _ huh?”

Now Jim blushes, and the ease with which Oswald divines this even despite the weak light does not say good things about Oswald’s earlier success in hiding his own. Oswald thinks about it, and finds that doesn’t bother him in the slightest.

When Jim had clamored back over the couch, whether it was intentional or not, he sat himself down a little further from Oswald than he had been when they were doing it, perhaps embarrassed to maintain such a proximity without the convenient excuse of sex around to make it okay. Recalling his earlier fancy re: giving Jim his craved intimacy if he could, Oswald makes a snap decision and scooches over, crawling until he’s in Jim’s lap, body resting against his side and cheek resting on his chest. If Jim wants to push him off, that’s fine, but this is Oswald’s only chance to give him this gift in return for those he’d received, and he’ll be damned if he lets go of it. Oswald has never been one to miss an opportunity. 

It gratifies him to no small degree that Jim does not, in fact, push him away, but rather wraps an arm around him instinctively and with, Oswald thinks, some relief. He hugs Oswald in closer and buries his face in Oswald’s hair (which is no doubt greasy, he hasn’t had time for a shower in  _ days,  _ but no matter). Jim seems to shudder again, at that touch. Like it was something he had been holding his breath for, and now it’s finally out.

Oswald feels the reluctant smile on Jim’s lips before he sees it.

“You remember that?”

Oswald scoffs. “I was having an  _ orgasm, _ Jim, not a concussion.” He bats his eyes then, twisting up so he’s sure Jim can see them. “Besides, I couldn’t possibly forget hearing something so  _ flattering. _ Is that what you call all the girls?”

It makes him feel a little cheap, saying this, but it is the low hanging fruit. Jim’s grip on him tightens, then, like maybe his hands have frozen in place. Ah. So he’s right, then? Or if not….

“Your name’s not John, is it,” Jim asks, catching Oswald entirely off his guard. It takes Oswald a second to chase down the conversational thread that brings them to this apparent non sequitur, but he does catch it, and once he’s caught it, he recovers quickly enough.

“No.” He does not add, “and please don’t ask me now because I’m so close to telling you but I can’t, there’s a reason I didn’t before, but if you ask me I’ll say it and then it’ll be there between us,” but if all that can fit into one syllable, Oswald does his best to force it.

Jim must hear the message, or has at least resigned himself to not getting more than what Oswald has already given. The thought… bites, a little. It makes Oswald feel stingy.

“Figured. I knew it wasn’t your real name, so not using it at all felt more… honest. But I had to call you something. I wish I knew you.”

It’s a confession like Oswald’s hadn’t hoped for, hadn’t even  _ wanted. _ Maybe it’s easier for Jim to say these sappy, saccharine things when he doesn’t have to look Oswald’s broken heart in the face for them. He wants a degree of revenge for that—he settles on repositioning himself so that Jim can see him looking.

He forces a smile.

“You said it yourself—what’s in a name? Even if I told you, you wouldn’t  _ know _ me.  _ James.” _

Oswald regrets it, though, he does, this most intelligent of the decisions he’s made tonight. He knows intrinsically that Jim would shorten it to  _ Oz _ given half an opportunity, can just imagine the way Jim’s mouth would curl around the soft  _ o, _ a perfect compliment to the indulgent way Oswald has been purring Jim’s name all night. It’s too late, though, and stupid to think about. He’ll never hear this boy say his name like he reveres it. The same would probably be true even if Jim  _ did _ know the sound, so what’s the difference?

“Tell me something, then,” Jim demands, sounding like he knows he’s asking something laughable but confident despite that.  _ Boys. _ “It doesn’t have to be something personal. Just… anything. You have a second job, besides the drugstore, right? Tell me about that. Please.”

It occurs to Oswald then that Jim might be trying to get him to talk for the sake of hearing him do it, which, if anything, is more laughable than the request. Oswald, the boy whose voice has a grating effect that makes near strangers and familiar associates alike want to strangle him? No one but Mother has ever wanted to hear what he has to say.

No one has ever  _ wanted _ him before, though, either. Despite his more cynical wariness, Oswald lets his cheeks pink and acknowledges  _ this _ line of questioning.

He still doesn’t want to reveal it, though. For reasons completely unrelated to his desperate cling to anonymity.

“You’re going to laugh at me,” Oswald protests, trying to keep his tone light.

Jim snorts. “It’s a job. You get paid. There’s no shame in that.”

Oswald peers up from his place against Jim’s chest, his eyebrows raised pointedly. “You  _ will _ laugh,” he pauses, considering, “but I suppose I’ve endured worse.”

“You’re a drama queen.”

“My second job is to be the fitting room boy at a women’s lingerie shop.”

Oswald lays this out as bluntly and as quickly as possible, leaving no room for Jim to anticipate the revelation.

Jim  _ chokes. _

He does an admirable job of playing it off as a cough; Oswald does have to give him that. When he’s done with the show of unexpected alarm (for all his best intentions, Jim really  _ hadn’t _ been expecting it, to be sure, but then, how could he have been?), Oswald looks at him, eyebrows raised, faintly amused. 

He’s never gotten to communicate  _ I told you so _ with his eyes so concisely before. Well, not without it being followed by immediate fear of death, at any rate.

“What was that? It’s a job, I get paid… what?”

Jim laughs, wrestling Oswald for his smugness. Feeling  _ incredibly _ satisfied, Oswald laughs, too, as he’s tackled and pinned, making no move to escape his fate. Now their positions are switched, Jim’s on top of  _ him, _ and Oswald looks up at him with eyes that are soft, affectionate, and faintly lunar.

If he were even 5% hornier, this would be the part where Oswald would initiate a round two. As things lie, he plants a cheeky kiss on Jim’s mouth because he can, then settles back into the plush cushions comfortably. Jim grins and flops beside him, their sides pressed together, his head nestled into Oswald’s neck simply because he has yet to prove averse to it.

Oswald loves that feeling—that he’s giving this boy the comfort and intimacy that he’s starved for, taking care of him as much as he’s being cared for. He wouldn’t have expected Jim to be so soft, but now that he knows this truth, he’s obsessed with it, drawn like a moth to flame, and inclined to push his luck.

Given an inch, Oswald has always taken a mile—a quality in him that Mother calls ambition and his bosses seem to universally consider overstepping his goddamn boundaries. Oswald suspects they’re both right, but no matter; right now, all this dangerous ambition does is push him for more points of contact between himself and Jim, and when Oswald takes Jim’s hand, Jim simply intertwines their fingers.

He glances at Oswald, then, from resting, their positions now necessitating that  _ he _ twists to look up at Oswald (and why does Oswald find he likes that so much?), eyes big and open and totally unrestrained.

“Really?” he says. “You’re just going to say that and not elaborate?”

“Oh,  _ that _ got your attention, then?” Oswald asks, amused.

“You knew it would!”

“I bet you’re conjuring up all sorts of dirty fantasies around it, too. Pervert.”

Jim immediately and vehemently denies this, protesting in such a way that Oswald doesn’t have to see the burn of his cheeks to know he’d been on the mark. Teasing him, half a grin breaks through his otherwise disapproving facade; Jim gives up the battle.

“Okay, okay. But at least tell me why.”

“Why?” Oswald repeats in mock surprise.  _ “Money, _ of course. What other ‘why’ is there?”

“Yeah, like the only place in all of Gotham that would have you was a lingerie business. I’m sure.”

“Well,” Oswald says defensively, “it’s not because I’m dying to ogle naked women, if that’s what you think.”

Jim looks at him, glances down at his own shirtlessness, and his edges seem to pink just the tiniest bit. “Somehow, it wasn’t my first guess.”

Oswald smiles, thinking about it for a second. In the end, he just gives a mental shrug. Fuck it, right? This thing he’s about to admit—it’s a thought he’s never voiced to anyone, not even so much as written down, but it’s like he told Jim earlier: it’s easier to talk to strangers.

He’d better talk fast, then, because that term seems to describe them less and less by the microsecond.

“Does the name  _ Fish Mooney _ mean anything to you?”

Jim blinks, thrown off his guard by the apparent switch in conversational threads. Oswald just lets him acclimate, not saying anything to help or impede his understanding; after a second, Jim shakes his head, brought back down to rest against Oswald’s chest.

“Can’t say that it does. Is that a fashion designer, or something?”

Not acknowledging the attempt, Oswald pounces on, feeling something dark and excited under his skin, in his face, in the hacksaw edges of his smile when he asks, “How about Carmine Falcone?”

Jim  _ does _ recognize this name, because he straightens up then, turning so he’s looking Oswald eye to eye as they start to actually, fully understand each other.

Oswald expects they’re nearing the breaking point of incompatible worldviews, but Jim hasn’t spooked off quite yet. His brow furrows.

“Mob boss, controls half of Gotham?”

“Oh, I think he controls a lot more than  _ that.” _

Jim looks at him, expression troubled. A little wary, maybe. “What’s your point?” he demands.

Oswald smiles. “I guess you could say that, at the end of the day, my employment at that fine establishment all comes down to him.”

A buzzing excitement vibrates inside of Oswald now. All his plans, finally vocalized—despite the mistrust he now sees in the pretty doe eyes of the stranger who’d so recently had a hand working his cock, the refreshment of a confidant, of saying these ugly, messy things aloud, is breathtaking. He almost wants to giggle.

“Explain.”

Jim’s voice is distrustful, but it’s interested even more than that. Oswald likes this—oh, yes, he  _ likes _ Jim. And he does so want to explain.

He’s always been just a bit too proud of his own cleverness that way.

“Right. I mentioned Fish Mooney, hm? Well, she’s not exactly a fashion designer. She’s an underboss—works the theater district under the patronage of Don Falcone. She’s new. The newest member of the family, in fact, but her territory has expanded greatly over what amounts to a fundamentally short period of time, she’s making a name for herself in Gotham, and—”

“—and she shops at your lingerie store. I got it.”

Oswald settles back into the sofa a little, pleased. His hand is still gripped in Jim’s, and neither of them are pulling away, even despite the harder edge in Jim’s voice now.

“My.  _ Someone _ catches on quickly.”

“What are you saying,” Jim asks, impatient. “You want to join the  _ mob?” _

Oswald shrugs, the self-congratulatory expression on his face saying  _ yes. _ “Better than working the night shift at a gas station where teenage ne'er-do-wells think they can come in and insult me with fake IDs, at any rate.”

“That’s not right,” says Jim’s mouth, though the firm grip of his hand tells a somewhat differing story. “That’s  _ immoral.” _

Oswald coughs out a little surprise of a laugh at the audacity. His hand on Jim’s doesn’t loosen any further than Jim had let it. “Oh, that’s rich—coming from the guy who told me not two hours ago that he was thinking of dropping out of highschool to do war crimes for an oil company.”

Jim opens his mouth as if to argue, glare fiercer than it had been since the K&D, and Oswald meets him with the same manic grin, begging him to try it—only this time, he’s not angry, not yet; he simply, genuinely, wants to know what Jim will do.

They hold this standoff for maybe full minutes before the tension finally snaps—and then they’re laughing again. Oswald has no idea who falls away first, but it’s absurd, the whole night has been absurd, and they laugh at it and themselves and each other.

When he laughs himself out, Jim lets his head fall back on the loveseat and makes a snap decision about his  _ morals, _ half a smile still leftover on his lips.

“Jesus, we’re fucked up, aren’t we,” he says, turning his head to catch Oswald, similarly leaned back on the seat, head turned to look at Jim. Oswald almost tells him to speak for himself, but they catch each other’s eyes and laugh again, instead.

“Jim, I hope I don’t offend you by saying so, but I think you and I are much the same. Quite ambitious—perhaps even more than our own good will allow—but dealt a poor hand, and doing whatever we can to make the best of it.”

Oswald’s voice is softer now, soothing, maybe. He casts his gaze at Jim’s pretty eyes and looks for understanding, camaraderie, kinship in the dull light.

Jim doesn’t acknowledge this similarity, but he doesn’t deny it, either.

What he does do, after a long, silent pause, is meet his sad eyes back with Oswald’s and ask, in a voice that is small, smaller than Jim’s years and his apparently boisterous personality, “Are we bad people?”

Oswald’s heart breaks a little for him, for his would-be soldier boy off to fight a war even he knows he does not believe in, ultimately, because he thinks it might lift him up out of darkness. He raises his free hand to Jim’s face and shakes his head, tears glassing his eyes (for he’s considered this question, too, weighed ascension against his mortal soul and found one lacking) but mouth turned into a hopefully reassuring smile.

“We are what we are, Jim. It’s late. Why don’t you try to get a little sleep?”

He makes to rise, then, to retreat to his room and maybe cry tears he doesn’t understand into his pillow until morning breaks, but Jim’s grasp on his hand anchors him back. He looks up at Oswald, and his eyes are searching and desperate.

“Stay with me?” he asks. Feeling intimate and displaced from any reality he’s ever known, Oswald gently flicks the switches on the few valiant lamps still casting shadows on the dark apartment and settles back on the loveseat  _ (loveseat), _ lying down on his side with Jim beside him, his prettier mirror image. There’s barely enough room for both of them to lie like this, but they make do, squeezed right into each other’s space, body pressed to body from their entangled legs to their foreheads, rested—hot and sticky with the various exertions of their night—one against the other. Oswald’s head is pillowed on a curled up arm, his other hand still gripped between their bodies with Jim's, held just around the space of their hearts. Jim’s breath is as laced with smoke and booze as it has been. Oswald wants to  _ drink _ it.

They lie against each other like that, breathing in synch and closer to one body than Owald has ever considered it was possible to be with another person, for a long, long time. It's quiet for so long that Oswald Oswald even starts to think that Jim must have drifted off, nothing but the rise and fall of his chest and the almost (but not quite) unpleasant heat radiating from Jim’s body telling Oswald that he’s holding anything more than a very heavy body pillow, but then, he speaks.

“What would you do?”

It’s soft, nearly to the point of being inaudible. Oswald pulls his head back, then, just enough to squint at Jim by the light still coming in through the windows, the ever-present background radiation of Gotham streetlights.

“Huh?”

“Say—say it wasn’t like this. Say you didn’t have any of these factors weighing on you, and you could do anything—anything—that you wanted. What would you do?”

Oswald tries to pull his almost-sleeping brain back into a mode where he could possibly be expected to think about his answer to a question like that. Stalling for time, he equivocates. “I suppose  _ you _ have an answer to this question?”

Jim’s eyes cloud over. “My father was the DA a few years ago,” he says (and Oswald promptly purges the information from his brain, because it sounds like a very identifying thing to know—how many district attorneys could there have been with now-18ish year old sons named James in the past 20 years?—and the whole point of this night was supposed to be the opposite of that, even if Oswald has now lost that point like the proverbial needle in a haystack). “Best DA the city ever had. Or something. Anyway, for a while, everyone expected me to be a lawyer like him.”

“But you didn’t want to?”

“I thought I did, at first.” Jim grimaces, hard enough that Oswald can see it clearly in the dark. “Kind of got over that around the time I got the first mark in my criminal record. Now… I don’t know what the hell else I would do. Even if I could. The army just feels like my ticket out.”

(Oswald files away this line about his criminal record without thinking; at the suggestion of his arrest, the whole scene plays out to him. Jim bought in for drunk driving or perhaps—yes—a fistfight, the police lenient with him because of what he looked like and who his father was, let go with a warning and an indulgent “boys will be boys” that others, others like Oswald, incidentally, would not be afforded, no matter how strict Jim considered his sentence. The information is neither a positive or negative light on Oswald’s perception of his company—it just is. A fact of life, as true and unfair as the color of his hair or the reality of his pretty, pretty eyes.)

Jim frowns, lost in thought.

“You?”

Oswald furrows his brow as he tries to think, but ultimately he comes to the same conclusion. 

“I have, honestly, no goddamn clue.”

He snorts, and Jim does too, laughing almost directly into Oswald’s mouth. Oswald doesn’t know what’s so funny, exactly. Perhaps just that Jim had been right—they’re both fucked up. Mirror images in shards, broken home problem children, and here they are, together, bemoaning their spent futures on an antique Hungarian loveseat.

_ (Loveseat.) _

“Maybe you can tell me what I should be,” Oswald suggests. It’s probably still the sherry talking. “Any ideas?”

Jim seems to consider it. “You could be a writer.”

“A writer.”

“A poet. You’re—you’ve got a way with words. You’re way too smart for the mob.”

Oswald wants to laugh, to tell Jim that his “way with words” is a talk-funny side effect of being a second generation immigrant. It seems pointless to reveal this now, though. Or maybe he keeps his tongue because he wants to say it so  _ badly. _

“Too bad I’ve never had a literary aspiration in my life. Oooh, can I pick one for you?”

Jim wrinkles his face, but looks faintly amused. Perhaps a little curious. “I don’t think I could stop you.”

“Fisherman.”

“What?” Jim looks at him, almost offended and comically disarmed.  _ “Why?” _

Oswald smiles into the void, biting down on a laugh. Putting on a face of false contemplation, he ticks off reasons: “High-adrenaline; you seem the type to desire that. No college degree necessary. Sailors don’t care about your criminal records.”

“Enough, enough,” Jim pleads. “You seem to have given this a lot of thought. You’ve got the same qualifications as me—maybe  _ you _ should be a fisherman.”

“Hm.” Oswald pretends to consider. “Yes. We could man the boat together—you, me, the untethered ocean… a regular Pequod. I’m Captain Ahab, obviously.”

Jim gives him a look. Oswald’s lost him. “Wait, what?”

“Oh, my God. I’m  _ begging _ you not to drop out of high school.”

Jim laughs, regarding him fondly and smiling more with his eyes (wonderful, sad, expressive,  _ beautiful _ eyes) than his mouth. “Maybe I won’t,” he says.

Oswald can’t help it—he kisses him then. Kisses that mouth that seems to not quite know what to do with itself, kisses this sweet boy whom he will probably never see again. Jim kisses him back, slowly, languidly, and they stay that way for an eternity, kissing like silk and luxury, like it’s the most important thing in the world, and in absolutely no rush to finish.

They kiss until it practically puts them to sleep, and then Jim buries his face in Oswald’s shoulder, breaths coming slow and steady and even. Oswald lies there in thought, lies for far longer than he’d waited, seemingly alone and awake in the dark before, and he thinks. Too many thoughts and too few, and no schemes to make him feel better like they normally would. Outside the window, Oswald sees the world get lighter in increments, the first rays of a new morning. He’d never before thought of a sunrise as a tragic ending.

In that last space between twilight and dawn, their night slipping away like sand between splayed fingers, Oswald presses his mouth close to the ear of the boy in his arms, sandy hair soft where it brushes his lips.

“Oswald,” he says, now that he knows it doesn’t matter. “My name is Oswald.”

The night is, for both of them, something monumental, something potentially life changing. As such, they have the choice that everyone does when faced with such a monumental, life changing event; they can either let it change them, or they can bury their heads, press snooze on a cosmic alarm for just a little while longer, and practice their God-given refusal of the call.

It’s no surprise to either of them what they, individually, end up deciding to do.

No surprise to Jim when he wakes up alone on a loveseat  _ (love…) _ in a cold apartment, half an hour late to school and counting, the boy whose name he never learned gone for another shift at another job to earn money to keep a roof over his head for another day. No surprise to Oswald when he gets home that night and the place is untouched and uninhabited. Jim didn’t have keys, but he shut everything nice and secure, and nobody wanted anything the Kapelputs had, anyhow—Jim didn’t take anything of Oswald’s or his mother’s, didn’t leave anything behind of his own. The perfect little boy scout, then. Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints. Jim hadn’t even really done that.

They lose the night quickly—first in blocks, the morning after, to the alcohol, then gradually, in weeks to come, to time. Both start to regard it as a kind of impossible dream; surely, nothing like that could have… that is….

They don’t know.

Even dreams have consequences, though, rippling aftershocks, and theirs go like this: Oswald comes perilously close to looking into the personal history of Gotham’s district attorneys for reasons he doesn’t even really recall. Jim finds himself walking blocks out of his way, staying with another friend on another couch, to visit a drugstore, where a new boy wears an oversized uniform and the name Oswald (not that Jim would have known to evoke it) is like a dirty word. He pushes himself through the end of the semester, though he hates it. They read  _ Moby Dick _ in senior English, and he doesn’t remember why that makes him think of the slight aftertaste of a cherry pie.

He still ships out a month after he gets his diploma. Back in Gotham, Oswald keeps working, longer and longer hours. He picks up Gertrud from the mental institution when he gets a call and they sob in each other’s arms, her insistence that they have  _ no one, no one but each other _ going totally uncontested.

Oswald starts smoking cigarettes, and though he doesn’t know where, exactly, he picked up the compulsion, it doesn’t surprise him in the least.

Jim Gordon, age 34, marches up to a group of criminals beating a scumbag in an alley with a badge, a gun, and a very practiced bad mood. Not for the first time in his life, he comes looking for a fight, and not for the first time in  _ his, _ Oswald Cobblepot, 35, defuses the situation as gratingly as a man knows how.

Jim does not see the hand on the bat and think of clever fingers from a dreamscape long shattered. The recognition in Oswald’s expression is not for the pretty eyes he’d once mooned at, for, and in, but for a whispered name in a private conversation: “Peter’s son, home from war. A hero. Jim Gordon.”

They don’t recognize each other as people they once knew. For each of them, that night has faded to nothing, shaded by substances and blackened by choice, a desire to forget something so impossibly good when everything else at the time had been so bad. What they do recognize, almost against their wills, is a composite image of themselves, hitting like an explosion as their paths cross in the next node of a snaking, sinusoidal dance with no limit in either direction.

“Oswald and Raoul were just having a little fun,” says Butch Gilzean, while they size each other up like it’s the first time. 

Jim just thinks—Oswald.

He’s heard that name before.

**Author's Note:**

> so apparently one of the prompts on the gobblepot summer event was "childhood friends," a fact of which i was actually not aware until i posted this and noticed a few fics with similar-ish themes in the ao3 tag. well, this wasn't written with that in mind, i'm not sure it even technically qualifies, and it's months late, but i hope this lives up to the excellent content all the other talented writers have posted!
> 
> if you've gotten this far, as always, thank you for reading. your support means more to me than i can say. 
> 
> tbh? the idea of teenage jim being a tough character and also a sweetheart got into my head and lives there rent free. i hope i did him and oswald justice, and, as a side note, i hope i also did justice to gotham the city, which i feel is practically a character by its own rights in the show, and so must also be in any media worth its salt that's set there. i love the lost-in-time atmosphere that gotham cultivates; you may have noticed my reference to the drugstore oswald works at being a "kinsley & darling"; kinsley & darling is a now-defunct drug store brand, closed since the 1850's, except, apparently, in gotham city.
> 
> i hope i'm not the only one who still cares about this pairing and their top-tier dynamic. come talk to me about them! i'll love you forever!


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